


and she had no fear

by HappinessIsBlau



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Death is personified AS A COOL SKELETON, Disembowelment, Gen, Overdose, SO ORIGINAL!!, Suicide, excessive gore, graphic descriptions of death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-03
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-11-08 10:17:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11079534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HappinessIsBlau/pseuds/HappinessIsBlau
Summary: “I better give us something good to talk about, if we're gonna be swapping stories.”





	and she had no fear

**Author's Note:**

> I listened to (Don't Fear) The Reaper the entire time I wrote this. 
> 
> Sole Survivor isn't named here, but she's a stone-cold badass which is universal. 
> 
> This contains some graphic gore, descriptions of death, and some trippy shit. My gore-level is a little off because I get to see pictures of crime scenes at school all the time, yay. If the Bloody Mess perk makes you upset, you probably don't wanna read this.

Death fleetingly visits her, sometimes.

She’s seen corpses as an attorney and they never bothered her. Work and home were two very different things for her -- even when Nate was stationed, she never thought of him as an objectified corpse. 

She knew he’d always come back to her. 

The Commonwealth brings stuff back to her that she’d buried, so she dreams.

It's some sort of fucked up combination of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome and the fact that home and work don’t exist anymore and she’s always on guard and gets an unhealthy lack of sleep.

She dozes off and wakes up when she sees Preston, behind her eyelids, disemboweled. The Zeglio case where the mother was mauled by a hacked Police Protectron -- her intestines falling out of her shattered corpse and onto the pavement was an image burned into her psyche. 

She wants to hug Preston when she sees him alive and well the next morning, but she doesn’t want to invade his personal space or worry him.

She wakes up with sweat-soaked sheets when she dreams that Curie gets shot in the face in Salem, by a bunch of villagers who swear that Curie’s a synth. How do they know? Did she have a tell that escaped previous notice? 

Her brains on the pavement look like Alexandria Ander’s, when the 15 year old girl's father blew her head off in the house next to Her and Nate’s. She saw the crime scene photos and said that she was too close to the case to be a good defense. 

Forty hours without sleep has Hancock making her sleep in his home, in his bed as he guards the door outside with Fahrenheit so that “You won’t worry so much, sister, you’re so high-strung lately, get some goddamn sleep.” 

She dreams that he overdoses. Needle in his arm, like George Ramos in 339b, Highpark Apartments, several blocks down the street. The track marks on George's arms showed years of abuse that finally got to him after one last big trip.

Nick and his too-many close calls. She daydreams, when she can’t sleep-dream, that he just shuts down one day, mid-sentence. His eyes go dark and he falls over, the red neon lights that flash VALENTINE casting a pink tone on his washed-out, synthetic skin. 

Strong gets nailed by a sniper. It was an accident, they say. He looked so very threatening, they insist. She knows by their tone that they wanted an excuse. 

Dogmeat gets crushed by an exploding car. 

Loyal Codsworth gets scrapped for parts by raiders. 

Cait gets beaten to death by her family, terrible and featureless silhouettes that want to sell her again. 

X6-88 kills himself. He can’t deal with a world outside of the institute. Danse, too -- being a crime against his own ideology becomes too much. 

Piper is lynched for treason against the Great Green Jewel. Nat watches, unable to look away. 

Deacon takes a bullet between his eyes. It breaks his glasses clean in half. 

MacCready outlives Duncan. That’s death enough, and she knows it. 

The people that she loves are destroyed one by one for a second time, in her dreams. 

 

"I DO NOT WANT YOU," Death says to her, skeletal fingers twirling her hair into a curl, the stench of rot hitting her like warm breath, 

"BUT I WANT EVERYTHING YOU HAVE. YOU WILL LIVE A THOUSAND LIFETIMES, UNTIL THERE IS NOTHING LEFT BUT YOU AND ME AND THE VOID. YOU ARE THE REAPER OF THIS EARTH. YOU ARE JUDGEMENT DAY INCARNATE. YOU DID NOT DIE IN FIRE BECAUSE IT COULD NOT DO ANYTHING TO YOU. I HAVE NEVER MET ANYONE WHO I COULD NOT HAVE BEFORE, AND I DO NOT LIKE IT." 

Death pauses, brushing cool bone fingers across her freckled, scarred cheek. 

"YOU WOULD HAVE GONE TO TO THE FOURTH ROUND OF THE NINTH CIRCLE, DAUGHTER OF ATHENA, BARRISTER AND SOLICITOR AND JUDAS. EXISTENCE GAVE YOU THIRTY SILVER COINS TO FORSAKE ME, SO I WILL ASK YOU: DO YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY FOR YOURSELF?" 

Her eyes find the empty sockets of Death’s skull. 

“I better give us something good to talk about, if we're gonna be swapping stories.” 

 

“I’m the reaper of this earth,” she reminds herself as she crushes the skull of a raider, using a sledgehammer as MacCready snipes them from the roof. 

“I’m judgement day incarnate,” she whispers to no one in particular as she pushes her gun up under the chin of a feral ghoul, putting the poor soul out of their misery at last. 

“I didn’t die in nuclear fire because it couldn’t do a damn thing to me,” she tells Piper, who writes that on the cover of the newest issue of Publick Occurrences. 

Her friends live, and she dreams.


End file.
